Trello Critical Features

[Marc W.]

Trello has asked me in the past for feedback, but now I have worked with it for long enough and with so many users of different skill levels that i can confidently list the 4 most critical feature requirements:

(1) Ability to move comments!!! - we need to move comments because our users are constantly commenting on the wrong card. These users are like lost children, they have no idea where they are in context, they comment off topic, or their comment needs to start a new card.

(2) Prevent users from editing description on cards!! - we have users who are completely clueless, they keep commenting in the description field! I had to go to every single card on a board and enter "DO NOT TYPE HERE" into the card descriptions to try and prevent this. This has far reaching implications - if a user comments in the description, we never receive a notification, and we don't know about their comment. In a scenario where there are deadlines involved, this could really be bad.

(3) Prevent users from replying to card notifications by email –– or at the very least, REMOVE SIGNATURE - we have users responding to card notifications by email and allowing their epic 20 line signatures to be added to the card. Not only is this confusing, hard to look at, and annoying, but it also skews any search results in Trello by including spurious information in a comment.

(4) Allow admins to EDIT COMMENTS. - related to #3, if we can't prevent signatures, then please let us edit their comment to delete the signature.

[Iain Dooley]

@Marc W. are the people doing this mostly external to your organisation? For example, you're using Trello to manage projects, then you create a project board and share it with your client, and they go and do all this stuff?

[Marc W.]

That's correct. I'm a one person organization.

Clients are invited to boards for whatever reason, design proofs, web support etc. Some of these users will only use Trello for the duration of the project and never again.

There is no time to do training, so we need to get Trello to be more idiot proof, so (1) disable card descriptions by board admin, (2) enable comment moving (3) enable comment editing (other users) by board admin. That should solve this.

[Iain Dooley]

@Marc W. yeah I've found the same thing with people who don't really use Trello for anything other than communicating with me. My approach has been that I will use Trello to keep track of projects and share the board with them if they want, but that I just use Trello to send emails to clients most of the time. That way they don't get Trello notifications at all, they can kind of see an overview of what's going on, and their reply emails come back into the same card I sent the email from. To do this, I use my product BenkoDesk:

http://www.benkodesk.com/

Let me know if you'd like to try it out. For what it's worth I had the same types of problems when I used to add clients to Basecamp Classic projects or Slack channels. When it comes down to it the best way to communicate between organisations that use disparate systems is via email as the lowest common denominator. This system gives you the best of both worlds.

[Marc W.]

Nah, I'm going to just wait and hope for these features. Trello boards are critical to how this works. Users need to use them, these are months long projects with multiple users, label managers, etc, we all need to see the board, email definitely could never work.

[Philip Espinosa]

I use Trello with a small team, five or fewer depending on the project. These features would be awesome! 

[mustafa sener _Hipporello_]

Marc,

While talking about users, do you mean external users like customers?

[Marc W.]

I don't know what an external user is. Any user on a board is a registered Trello user.

Also another thing we need besides the items above is to be able to disable comments on a card-by-card basis. We use some cards as calendar reminders and don't want comments on those.